Franz Kafka by Saul Friedländer

Author:Saul Friedländer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2013-06-28T16:00:00+00:00

Part II

“The Reward for Serving the Devil”

4

Night Journey

ON SEPTEMBER 25, 1917, half a year or so after writing “A Country Doctor” and a few weeks after being diagnosed with a lung infection (soon to be identified as tuberculosis), Kafka noted in his diary: “I can still have passing satisfaction from works like ‘A Country Doctor,’ provided I can still write such things at all (very improbable). But happiness only if I can raise the world into the pure, the true and the immutable.”1

What did the second sentence mean? How did Kafka imagine “the pure, the true and the immutable”? Did he consider “A Country Doctor,” the story that gave him satisfaction, as partaking of that effort toward a radical transformation? Enigmatic as usual, Kafka left us with a story and a riddle. In fact, the story itself remains a riddle, notwithstanding all exegesis. Yet this short text, one of Kafka’s most accomplished creations, evokes indirectly some of the major issues to which he kept returning: a shameful absence of feelings and moral responsibility, a confused and confusing sexuality, the evasiveness of truth and, mainly, the Evil in the world and of the world.

1

On a wintry night, an old country doctor has been called to a village ten miles away, where a seriously ill patient needs his help. He is waiting, “muffled in furs,” his medical bag in hand, his carriage ready; during this same night, his exhausted horse has died. Rosa, the maid, is running around in the village to borrow a horse. “It was hopeless, I knew it, and I stood there forlornly, with the snow gathering more and more thickly upon me, more and more unable to move. In the gateway the girl appeared, alone, and waved the lantern; of course, who would lend a horse at this time for such a journey?”2 The contrast between the immobility of the old man standing in the courtyard as the snow is accumulating around him and his young maid “running around the village” is stark, but he does not seem to notice it. Very soon, he will bitterly regret having been so oblivious of her presence.

In despair, the doctor kicks at the door of a long abandoned pigsty. In quick succession, a groom, showing an “open blue-eyed face,” and two magnificent horses crawl out. The groom starts harnessing, the maid is told to give him a hand, but as she stands near him, he grabs her and bites her on the cheek, leaving the imprint of two rows of teeth. The groom “marked” her; she now belongs to him, as a mark burned into the ears of cattle identifies their owner. Furious, the doctor threatens the groom with the whip, yet soon gives up and settles in the carriage. Ordered to come along, the groom refuses, and before the doctor can react, on the groom’s signal, the horses and the carriage tear off. The doctor merely hears the door of his house “splitting and bursting as the groom charged at

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